John Miko and I received a distinguished paper award at ISECON for our paper, “Taking it to the Top: A Lesson in Search Engine Optimization.”

This paper , presented on Halloween eve in Nashville, focused on the technology concepts students learned while completing the SEO Contest exercise in CS 299.  The abstract follows.

Search engine optimization (SEO), the promoting of a Web site so it achieves optimal position with a search engine’s rankings, is an important strategy for organizations and individuals in order to promote their brands online. Techniques for achieving SEO are relevant to students of marketing, computing, media arts, and other disciplines, and many college courses have begun to include SEO as part of their curricula. This paper describes an exercise for learning about SEO that mimics a popular online event known as an SEO contest. Contest participants implement a variety of SEO techniques in order to achieve the top position for an assigned word or phrase in a search engine’s results. This paper also examines the learning benefits that such an exercise provides.